Android activations surpass 900,000 per day

Mark Raby, 11th June 2012

In case you were wondering whether or not the Android fervor was still as strong as ever...
Google's head of all things Android Andy Rubin has announced that the average number of Android devices now being activated on a daily basis is greater than 900,000.

He made the announcement via a message on Twitter.

He didn't announce how much of that came from smartphones and how much came from tablets, but clearly Android is continuing to see explosive growth, and there is no real end in sight.

Rubin made his last official "this is how many Android devices are being activated every day" announcement back in February. At that time there were 850,000 activations per day.

Last December, Rubin clarified that when he makes these announcements, "We count each device only once. Activations means you go into a store, buy a device, and put it on the network by subscribing to a wireless service."

So this means when an Android phone is upgraded, or someone buys a used Android device, that is not tallied. Rubin made the clarification after previous milestone announcements led to confusion by some media reports as to what an "activation" actually meant.

In January, Google CEO Eric Schmidt announced that 550,000 Android phones were being activated daily while Rubin said 700,000 Android "devices" were activated daily, which means that between 100,000 and 150,000 Android tablets were part of that equation. And that ratio has probably shot up since the Kindle Fire has come to mature.